Next presentation, Impact Minerals, Mike Jones, veteran of the industry. This truly is mixed commodities, but they made excellent progress. Thank you.
Thanks for staying into the last session, ladies and gentlemen, to hear about the Impact story. I'll just show you here that this is what we like to call our magic lake, not so much for how it looks at certain times of the day in the year, but in the top two meters of that lake is something in the order of about $15 billion worth of high-purity alumina. HPA is its call. It's a niche mineral, but it's a critical part of the whole energy transition that we're currently going through. We've just recently earned 80% of that by completing a pre-feasibility study.
That was our first acquisition, but back in April, we announced that we had purchased a 50% share in a pilot plant for HPA that we acquired from a competitor of ours in the space that had gone into administration merely because of financial mismanagement. We're going to take that material, dig it up, we're going to transport it to that shed in Fremantle that we paid $2 million for, and we're going to convert it into this. This is the Las Vegas Dome. It's covered by 1.8 million light-emitting diodes, and behind every LED is a small wafer-thin piece of sapphire. That's what HPA is, alumina, and a form of that is artificial sapphire. That market is growing tremendously.
We believe that these two projects together, the lake and the pilot plant we just purchased, is going to transform the production of high-purity alumina because we believe we're going to be the lowest cost producer globally by a significant margin. As well as LEDs and sapphire, it's used now increasingly extensively in the semiconductor industry in two roles. One, it's actually used to polish the silicon carbide that's used now in many semiconductors. HPA is one of the hardest substances known to mankind. It's chemically inert and thermally inert, so it works in a number of modern industries. It's also used for cooling. On the top of every semiconductor is a small piece of HPA. That market is expanding at an enormous rate as we're putting in all the AI centers. Lastly, electric vehicles, increasing use to stop the batteries exploding.
We've all seen pictures of the Tesla batteries catching on fire. That's because the separator is not doing its job. It's peeled away from the battery wall, allows heat to build up, and that separator is made of HPA in many instances. That market is expanding at about 20% per annum. In the blue here, on the top of this graph, we're seeing the projected rate up until 2030. In the bar chart, little things in there, we're seeing basically an emerging supply deficit in the next couple of years, 2026, 2027, and we're going to see a price squeeze on HPA. It's already worth quite a bit of money, and it's all about how pure the material is that you're going to produce. We get what we call smelter-grade HPA. That comes out of the Bayer process from alumina and miners' bauxite.
We then have to purify that to get it to the higher grades. Depending on what grade you're producing, it determines the price. The benchmark is about 4N or 99.99% pure. Four nines, that's what the 4N stands for. It's currently trading between $15,000 - $30,000 US dollars a ton. That's where the volume is. That's where you build your business. You can get higher margins, higher returns for ultra-pure material, 5N and 6N, but those volumes aren't as great. That's the cream on the top. What we have is a very high margin and high demand business. It's all about what you can produce this material at. We're going to take our material from Lake Hope. It's located about 500 km east of Perth, and we're going to truck it into Perth itself where we have ready access to reagents and skilled workforce.
We've got enough alumina there for at least a 40 - 50-year mine life. It's an industrial mineral. There's no shortage of it. It's all about the process and the cost to get to HPA. How do you drill out a $15 billion US dollar ore body? It's very simple. You take a rubber mallet and a plastic push tube, and you just hammer it into the ground down to about two meters, and it comes out looking like that material in the bottom right-hand corner. The entire drill program to put out our 30, 40-year mine life costs us AUD 150,000 for a $15 billion US dollar return. At this point, I normally lose people because they just say they can't quite compute that those two numbers are the same, but that's the uniqueness of this project and how we are going to transform the production of HPA.
It's going to be very simple. We're just going to drive it off the side of the lake into the high-grade area shown there in purple. That's about a kilometer from east to west. We're going to stockpile it on the edge of the lake and then transport it into Perth. We've already got heritage clearance on the lake and environmental clearance on the lake, so there are no impediments to moving forward with mining of Lake Hope. We just completed the pre-feasibility study. I have an A-class team on there, two standouts, husband and wife team, top right, bottom left, 50 years of alumina experience building plants for alumina, and they have their own technology for high-purity minerals, which we're tapping into. It's a world-class parent pair there. I mentioned the PFS.
This slide has got a number of bits of information there, but the key figure there is NPV, 10% discount, $1.2 billion. For those of you not aware, because you'll hear NPV mentioned, it's the net present value. That's actually the value of the stuff in the ground to us right now. In theory, somebody should be able to come along with a check for $1.2 billion, and I'd sell it to them. I'd probably sell it to them for a lot less than that at the moment, but that's actually the value. That's where the value lies in the Impact Minerals share price because we're currently sitting at a market cap of about $30 million, and it's that value gap that my job is to fill over the next couple of years to get it up to that $1 billion value as we move forward.
The way we're going to do that, I think, as I say, is tackle the market as the lowest cost producer. The rest of this chart here shows on the right-hand side the current incumbents, the Chinese and the Japanese, who are the dominant suppliers, and they're producing their HPA somewhere between $12,000 and $20,000 a ton. Hopefully, some of you have all made great money out of Alpha HPA. A4N is their code. It's the only success story for HPA bar Impact on the ASX. They're currently producing at about $8,000 or $9,000 a ton. We believe that we're going to be down at $5,800, and if you include byproduct credits, $4,500. That is a light year away from any other competitor. We believe that that's going to drive the interest in the company.
I won't dwell on this too long, but many of you probably heard stories about high-purity alumina, high-purity manganese, and graphite, and there are lots of challenges to actually getting to high-purity anything. You need the right process, you need your own laboratory, you need to be able to react, recycle your own reagents, and importantly, clients won't take you seriously unless you've got a pilot plant, and then finally, you've got to finance the scale up. That's a lot of barriers to get in, but if you've listened to Warren Buffett, what it does if you can get over those barriers, it creates a moat that is very difficult for other people to get over, and we're seeing Alpha HPA Limited creating an immense moat around what they're doing right now, and we believe that we can do the same.
In terms of purity, we've got a federal government grant to use some pieces of string to get to high-purity alumina. Edith Cowan University has world-class researchers in membrane technology, and we're implementing stuff that's been used in the water treatment industry for decades, and we basically put some plastic strings with holes in it into some pipes, pump the material through, and it actually removes a lot of the impurities. It's a game-changing technology, and we believe it's going to be an integral part of what we're doing going forward. I mentioned that we purchased a 50% share of one of the assets of our failed competitor. What do we get for our money? The process is called Hypura, and we believe it's a bolt-on.
The chemistry of the lake is very similar to the chemistry of the material they're currently putting through that pilot plant, which is located in Perth. We bought a fully functional high-purity laboratory. It's about $1 million worth of kit just in through there, which gives us instant turnaround for our assays, and that's a hugely important thing when you've got a pilot plant. This is a ChemX's journey, and I always like to just sort of put this in there. Their last sample, we just crossed out ChemX and stuck Impact over the top of it. The biggest thing we bought is a 25,000-ton per annum pilot plant. It's 90% commissioned. It's ready to turn on. The guys have been in there since 1st of May when we took the keys off the administrator. We've got the facility there.
We can probably expand to several hundred tons per annum production if we want to. The biggest thing we've actually purchased is time because despite the fact that we're only at pre-feasibility study, we really only doing test work. We didn't have a pilot plant. We had a plan for one. There are other players in the game, microplant, engineering studies. Most of those guys are gone. I don't think any of them will get any further. It's at least two years away from getting to a pilot plant and a commercial plant, and only Alpha HPA Limited are in that stage now. They're scaling up to 10,000 tons per annum production.
For our money, $2.2 million, we've gained two years in time, $6 million in overheads, and we're now the only other company, apart from Alpha HPA Limited, that's capable of producing any quantities of HPA and probably will be for quite some time. The whole thing about Hypura, it's modular. We can expand this thing in small scale anywhere in the world. We've had significant interest already from Southeast Asia. We're establishing agents in Europe, and our plan is over the next couple of years to establish a base in North America. Right now, this is what's going to happen over the next two years to drive that value gap from $30 million to $1 billion. Is it finished the plant? Turn it on. That's happening right now.
It'll take six months to come up to speed, and then at that position, we'll have material we can hand out to clients. We've now got a pilot plant. If you remember, clients will now take us seriously. 2026 is a story about engaging with customers, taking those offtake agreements, and in 2027, looking for a listing on the Nasdaq as we scale up to several thousand tons per annum of production. Veteran of the industry, been around for a long time. Always wanted to find a billion-dollar deposit. This is it. We believe this is the one that's going to make us. Current market cap, $30.08 today. I won Peter and Pitch yesterday, so I was doing something good. It was about quite a few shares went through today. I'll just finish by talking about Alpha HPA Limited.
Eight years ago, $20 million market cap, now $1 billion, and they're building a 10,000-ton per annum plant. The significant thing is that they've had indicative demand for 30,000 tons. If we build this thing, the customers are going to come. Come with us on the journey. We've got a unique deposit. It's in Western Australia, best place to work, industry-disruptive metallurgical process, rapidly building out our customer integration skills, final product. If you remember that by 2027, there's going to be a deficit in the market, and that's just about the right timing for a listing in North America and starting to provide product in this exciting industry. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mike. I've been following the Impact story for a long time, and it was a long period of minimal technical risk, just hard work. Good luck to Impact Minerals shareholders.